Five Stages of Mad Genius (in progress)
I am currently working on a work for soprano and string quartet that explores how artists of different personalities may wrestle with the myth of mad genius. As someone with multiple psychiatric diagnoses myself who grew up being perceived as having an “artistic temperament,” I find myself facing the question: how do you fight a stereotype when you are the stereotype? This musical work, falling somewhere in between art song and opera, is my answer.
The first movement, “The artist wants to be a genius by encouraging madness,” was workshopped and premiered at the Creative Music Intensive run by Arts Letters & Numbers in August 2024. The performers are Bergamot Quartet and myself.
echo chamber, by Amanda Rizzo
At the Creative Music Intensive run by Arts Letters & Numbers in August 2024, I performed in the premiere of this work by Amanda Rizzo. I had to speak and act based on a text score, while Amanda electronically manipulated my voice. Django Gregerson performed on marimba, basing his performance on a graphic score.
freeing child
Composed for the Nief-Norf Summer Festival in June 2023, freeing child is a text score work for 3-5 performers who are adults that guides the performers in a musical reflection upon their relationship to children and childhood. It involve open instrumentation, speaking prompts, recordings of a child speaking and laughing, and lots of collective improvisation.
fluxing, quivering, transforming
Part music composition, part performance art, this 12-minute “more-than-piano” work narrates my intertwined journeys of gender identity and mental illness/Madness through traditional and extended piano technique (including brushing the piano strings with Chinese calligraphy brushes), vocalization, text, and improvisation upon/as a tarot card reading. Composed as part of my undergraduate senior thesis project and premiered in my senior thesis recital.
I was selected to perform fluxing, quivering, transforming at New Music Gathering 2023 in Portland, Oregon. But then, misfortune occurred: my luggage did not get on the plane, which meant I did not have two crucial items I needed for the performance: the extra-large Chinese calligraphy brushes, and the Next World Tarot card deck. I made the decision to alter my performance in this way: at the section where I was going to use the brushes, I took out scissors and tried to cut my hair. The struggle to cut my hair became a symbol of my struggle with my gender identity and mental health. After the performance, I burned the pieces of cut hair as a private cleansing ritual for myself.
Here is an essay I wrote about the whole experience.
Sound and Story: My Senior Thesis Recital
Check out the recital website for my senior thesis recital in May 2023, where you can browse the digital program guide (aka program notes) and watch the video recording.
rainbow mirror upon the cooling box
A collection of poetry, composed from a small number of Magnetic Poetry magnets discovered in an old box belonging to the student residence Quaker House at Haverford College, set to sounds created in Ableton Live. An exploration of queerness, madness, and magic.
when pneum is named
Composed for Wildflower Composers 2020, for bassoon and fixed media. The score is a video that pans through a graphic I created that provides instructions and stimuli for the bassoonist to respond to. The bassoonist listens to the fixed media when performing and allows it to further guide their creativity. Here is a Haverford College article about my and another Haverford student’s experiences at Wildflower (then called Young Women Composers Camp).
When I see you cry
An art song for soprano and piano; text is my own. This song was featured on the podcast of World Beyond War in the episode ”Digging Deeper with Nicholson Baker, and a Song by Margin Zheng.”
Story in Si
A solo piano work using extended techniques. This was my final project for a course I took in my first semester of college on literary translation. Instead of translating to another textual language, I created a musical transformation of the Mandarin Chinese poem “Story of Shi Eating the Lions,” which when read aloud is a single phoneme (“shi”) repeated in different tones. There are many text-music correspondences, the most prominent of which is the translation of phoneme repetition into the usage of only the pitch-class G# (“si” in fixed-do solfege, which looks and sounds similar to “shi”)).
Some of my other works can be found on my SoundCloud and Youtube channel.
Crisis, Care, Creation
On April 20th, 2020, I performed a virtual concert on Zoom centering on the climate crisis. The concert was based on Lola Perrin’s Significantus and involved audience participation in breakout discussion groups and collective improvisation. It was sponsored by the E. Clyde Lutton 1966 Memorial Fund and the John B. Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts and Humanities at Haverford College. Read the concert description here and a reflective essay I wrote afterwards here. Below is the recording of the event:
